Richness in diversity

I seem to have missed the name David Crystal. He is clearly a phonetician, expert in linguistics, but the blurb tells us little about him except that he appears on television. He comes across as a genial cove. In one of his many digressions on the subject of words — this book is composed of them — he tells us of the arrival of that very word ‘blurb’.

‘Just occasionally we can be in on a word-birth.’ In 1907, in New York, an author didn’t like his book-jacket, he wanted it more appealingly lurid. So he ‘sketched out a buxom blonde on one of the jackets and labelled her “Miss Belinda Blurb”.’ The name caught on. The same author later defined what that word came to mean. ‘1. A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial. 2. Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.’ Perhaps that is why David Crystal caused his own blurb to be so unboastful that it tells us too little about himself.

His method appears random but is not. To read him is like listening to a well-informed companion thinking aloud. His next paragraph after the ‘blurb’ one is about Shakespeare’s coinages, and ponders why some of these entered the language while others did not. This is followed by a reference back to one of his wilder digressions, about the communicative powers of bees: they do not go in a bee-line, they dance.

Words are his passion, but so are all forms of communication: TV plays, films, popular songs, poems, and the abbreviations of texting are all grist to his mill (if he had used that phrase he would have given us an unpompous history of the word ‘grist’).

A book by W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, in which ‘personal reflections, historical allusions and travel observations randomly combine’ was his inspiration for this linguistic journey.